Julia Kristeva

Julia Kristeva, born Yuliya Stoyanova Krasteva on 24 June 1941, is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, semiotician, psychoanalyst, feminist, and novelist. She has resided in France since the mid-1960s. She has taught at Columbia University and is currently a professor emerita at Université Paris Cité. She has authored more than 30 books, including *Powers of Horror*, *Tales of Love*, *Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia*, *Proust and the Sense of Time*, and the trilogy *Female Genius*. Her honors include Commander of the Legion of Honor, Commander of the Order of Merit, the Holberg International Memorial Prize, the Hannah Arendt Prize, and the Vision 97 Foundation Prize from the Havel Foundation.

Kristeva gained prominence in international critical analysis, cultural studies, and feminism following the 1969 publication of her first book, *Semeiotikè*. Her extensive body of work covers intertextuality, the semiotic, and abjection across linguistics, literary theory and criticism, psychoanalysis, biography and autobiography, political and cultural analysis, and art and art history. She is a key figure in structuralist and poststructuralist thought. She also founded the committee that awards the Simone de Beauvoir Prize.

Kristeva was born in Sliven, Bulgaria, to Christian parents; her father was a church accountant, and her mother’s side has distant Jewish ancestry. She and her sister attended a Francophone school run by Dominican nuns, where she first encountered the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. She studied at the University of Sofia and, as a postgraduate, received a research fellowship that allowed her to move to France in December 1965 at age 24. She continued her education at EPHE under scholars including Lucien Goldmann and Roland Barthes. On August 2, 1967, she married novelist Philippe Sollers (born Philippe Joyaux). She taught at Columbia University in the early 1970s and remains a visiting professor. She has also published under the name Julia Joyaux.

After joining the Tel Quel group founded by Sollers, Kristeva focused on the politics of language. She trained in psychoanalysis and earned her degree in 1979. Her work often adapts a psychoanalytic approach to poststructuralist criticism. Her view of the subject, always “in process” or “on trial,” shares similarities with Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan but rejects a structuralist understanding, contributing to the poststructuralist critique of essentialized structures while preserving psychoanalytic teachings. She traveled to China in the 1970s and later wrote *About Chinese Women* (1977).

A major contribution is her theory that signification comprises two elements: the symbolic and the semiotic. The semiotic, distinct from Saussurean semiotics, is tied to infantile pre-Oedipal stages and the instincts, dwelling in language’s fissures and prosody rather than denotative meanings. It is associated with the musical, poetic, rhythmic, and the “feminine,” representing the undifferentiated state of the pre-Mirror Stage infant. Entering the Mirror Stage, the child distinguishes self from other and enters the symbolic realm of shared cultural meaning, where language allows the child to become a “speaking subject” with a separate identity from the mother. This separation process, called abjection, requires rejecting the mother to enter language, culture, and the social. The symbolic is associated with the masculine, law, and structure. Unlike Lacan, Kristeva holds that the subject continues to oscillate between the semiotic and symbolic even after entering the symbolic, remaining permanently “in process.” Female children, who identify more with the mother, may retain a closer connection to the semiotic, potentially leading to melancholia as described in *Black Sun* (1989). Some scholars suggest that the degradation of women and women’s bodies in popular culture, such as slasher films, stems from the threat the mother’s body poses to identity, reminding viewers of the undifferentiated semiotic state. After abjecting the mother, subjects retain an unconscious fascination with the semiotic, desiring reunion while fearing loss of identity; slasher films allow safe reenactment of abjection by vicariously expelling the mother figure. Kristeva also adopts Plato’s idea of the chora.